You are talking about money, pay and jobs. But what about interest in knowledge and the subject matter? Is that a fringe aspect for americans?
Not fringe, but personally, I didn't go to school for subject-specific knowledge. I went to school to learn how to learn and for "foundation" knowledge. Now I am continuously learning new things, including those specifics relevant to my job. I consider myself a "lifelong learner" and I am able to continue to educate myself quite successfully with Google, Wikipedia, Amazon.com, Powells.com, two local library chains, a major university library, and what I learned 15 years ago at college.
My abilities and my compensation do not seem to be reduced because I didn't complete another year of school. Competent developers with no degree, B.S. degree or B.S. & M.S. get about the same amount of money where I work, depending on their experience and leadership abilities. PhD's are not considered for what I do because they have decided to label themselves researchers, and we don't do significant research where I work.
So, having lost nothing by not having the M.S., but having gained a year of full-time employment when money was tight, I'm fairly confident that I made the right decision. A foreign student, wishing to become a permanent resident of the US could see the two year jump on the Green card and the opportunity to work locally with potential employers to be a significant boost to their career. They might make a different decision based on their very different circumstances, and they would also be right.
If she's ill, how can the Doctor trust the information she's provided to be accurate ?
Sounds an awful lot like: If she's mentally ill, how can she be trusted with any responsibilities? Which is a common first step in claiming that the mentally ill are not qualified to have legal agency (be granted human rights). That just happens to be one of my personal areas of interest in the intersection between medicine and law (though I am neither a doctor nor a lawyer).
Just because she's sick or depressed or manic or suffering from any of a number of other conditions does not mean that she is no longer intelligent, is unable to accurately recall observations, and no is longer the best judge of many changes to her body. If she's delusional or suffering from dementia or one of a short list of similar mental problems, then and only then is it appropriate to suspect the accuracy of her observations.
Even if her conclusions are wrong, her pharmacological history and observations are asserted facts, and for the doctor to not even bother to read that data indicates that (s)he's a piss-poor doctor.
If your process claims to be agile, and a single person is at the office after 8pm, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
One of the twelve key practices of XP is "No Overtime". The very first value statement of the Agile Manifesto is to value "Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools". (the team members are valuable, so don't abuse them)
Not to say that there aren't plenty of shops like yours, who think that "no written requirements and a release every month" means they're agile. But that's not agile, just abusive.
I think the point is: the US Dollar is not in any way backed by the holdings of the Fed. Instead it's backed by the government's ability to tax the people.
Actually, the US dollar as money is backed by the assets against which bank loans are provided. The US dollar as currency is backed by the government. Luckily, the government doesn't have to hold all that many assets in reserve to completely cover the US dollar as currency.
So many things become simpler when you understand that money and currency are different and that the relationship between money and currency is rather fluid.
a lot of people don't sit easy with the idea of the Fed.
A lot of people who don't understand economics. Not to say that they're stupid for not knowing, but they are pretty silly for criticizing the experts without really understanding what they're criticizing.
Currency -- Money -- Wealth
Three completely separate, interrelated, and incredibly important measures in an economy. If you think any two of these things are the same, you need to learn more.
Another thing that I consider important is: through fractional reserve banking flows of money that "isn't there" are created. It's not a US-only problem.
It's only a problem if you confuse currency with money. They aren't the same. Banks (outside of central banks) don't create currency. What normal banks do is separate the supply of money from the supply of currency by determining the wealth/value of other assets (making the supply of asset-backed money much bigger than the supply of currency). This isn't a mistake or even slightly shady. This process (along with the central bank's benevolent control over the currency supply) is largely responsible for the enormous economic growth of the 20th century.
Banks aren't allowed to loan out more than they accept as deposits, so they always have assets on the books that are worth more than their debts. If all of the depositors to a bank head over and demand their deposits, the bank would have to borrow cash from other banks to meet those demands. But it could do it. The other banks would accept the loans as assets against which they're willing to temporarily provide cash. Everyone from that bank has their money back, the loans are still being collected against, etc. Now, the bank is probably in trouble, but it's depositors are just fine.
Inflation and deflation are measures of changes between the amount of money in an economy and the quantity of wealth, sometimes called value or utility, available for exchange. This change happens no matter what the kind of currency. Even precious metal money supplies can't be kept exactly aligned with the quantity of wealth and you usually have slow deflation as the supply of wealth grows slightly faster than the supply of currency. Economists have (very publically) determined that a steady state of low inflation results in the highest levels of both investment and economic growth, so our money supply is controlled such that it grows slightly faster than the underlying value/wealth in the economy. The result? Much faster economic growth.
Fundamentally, in an economy, there are three huge concepts: currency, money, and wealth. They're all different and whenever you see people getting their panties in a twist about banking, you can be certain someone thinks you can't (or shouldn't) separate the concepts of money and currency, with disastrous consequences for the resulting conclusions.
Except that if the subject hasn't given the photographer rights, he's got no right to publish the photo on Flickr at all under any license.
Which rights? Right to publicity? The photographer didn't need that right to put the photo in his Flikr album. Virgin does need that right to use her image in their mass-market advertising. Interestingly, the CC license the photographer chose specifically excludes the right of publicity (it says you have to make sure you have that separately).
Hm. The specific rights needed are critically important here, and they're different for the photographer and Virgin because the uses are different.
My prediction: Virgin will settle (and they'll settle for plenty because they would otherwise lose), the photographer will not be in trouble at all.
That's NERVA, not Orion. I'm kinda partial to NERVA myself. You can get particle velocities (and therefore impulse) way up without all of the drama of bomb flinging.
And Orion isn't stupid, it's just impractical for peacetime deployment since it quickly becomes the only means of getting itself into orbit (at least until we begin taking apart asteroids and building things from in-space materials). The NIMBY freaks would be all up-in-arms about this taking off nearby. And for once, they may be right...
The link you provide starts off with a good skewering of Richard Dawkins, but then goes way too far into Christian apologetics to follow through on any sort of constructive argument.
Dawkins is wrong because... the Bible is right? Wow.
He had me at "Dawkins is an ass." The rest? Not so much.
I actually sort of smirked when you implied that I don't "understand or accept science." Yeah... Well, I'm sure that you're a very big guy in the philosophy of science field, but I guarantee that I do, in fact, understand science.
Hm. I thought that we had moved on to discussing why I might come across as arrogant, specifically in response to your first post where you weren't following the argument and getting yourself all confused. But I guess things got confused again. Seems to be a theme.
You say you're hot shit scientist and philosopher? I'll take your word for it. I'll let you know that you don't present arguments like a hot shit scientist. You do present arguments like a certain branch of philosophy student that I normally have very little time for.
Before you get too excited about my category errors, please resolve your own. An example of your confusion: "a bit different from Apes" is not the same kind of assertion as "Man is not an animal but is intrinsically different in kind." By pretending that those two statements are similar, you're just making simplistic and naive apologetic assertions.
You know, the more I think about it, the less I buy your claims about your background. Not even a continental philosophy student would make the kinds of mistakes you're making (while simultaneously slinging mighty big assertions about my errors). You still haven't understood or responded to the original statement. Just doesn't make any sense. If someone's actually paying you for more than lab work, they're getting ripped off.
I don't quite understand why right now there seems to be a movement to take one of the most unconvincing iterations of "Christianity" (the conservative, Biblical literalist strain that is so popular in the US) and write reams and reams about how it means atheists are so smart
I don't think that that's the conclusion to draw. The much earlier argument is that the ascent of one of the most unconvincing iterations of "Christianity" into power in this country is worth some very serious alarm. In my opinion, it is worth significant quantities of effort to make sure that this unconvincing iteration of Christianity remains unconvincing by arguing against it any place it appears.
If my alarm comes across as non-scientific, that's because it is not a scientific argument. While based on scientific underpinnings, the issue is actually a political struggle against a very well-funded opponent.
Yeah, I'm abrupt. Yeah, I'm certain of myself (on this subject). No, we're not talking about my area of research. No, I haven't thought that I was discussing an interesting topic with peers.
No worries on any of it. Seems as though you don't share my alarm. Maybe you have better things to do with your time. Maybe the thought of living in a theocracy doesn't worry you. It worries me. So I'm doing my best, here and elsewhere, to argue against the growing power of the religious right.
You don't write like someone in science. You do write like someone with a continental philosophy background. You also happen to write like someone with a religious background. Based on your statements, I concluded that you held one of these two positions (neither of which I have much respect for) and answered you as if we were debating and not discussing my posting.
I felt that I had already sufficiently clarified "special" as a difference of kind, and not simply of quantity. This definition of special is specifically chosen by modern Christian leaders who assert "Man is not an animal but is intrinsically different in kind." I made no assumptions in defining "special" the way I did (at least no non-metaphysical assumptions), so my response was to reiterate my definition more exhaustively.
a definition with which I take serious issue anyway
Great. Please provide your better definition.
it is not at all clear that humans would not be special, according to that definition.
It seems simple enough to describe the feature. Religious leaders have been trying to do so for millenia. The best they've got so far is "the soul", an ineffable construct which modern cognitive science is quickly deconstructing.
Again, no one is denying that we exist as "animals."
Christian leaders in the US absolutely do deny this. My original post was an observation about that denial, which is at the center of their denial of evolution.
(As an aside, I dislike the quotation convention which states that closing punctuation goes inside quotation marks, even when calling out a single word and not being used to surround a quotation. I prefer the British "convention".)
However, semantics aside, it is not difficult to see why most people take issue with the notion that, simply because we have a lot in common with other creatures, we are not different in some very substantial and meaningful ways, which separate us from them.
I understand why people want to believe that, and I label it appropriately: it is pride, or more precisely, hubris. The motivation is not difficult to grasp as it seems hard-wired into our biology. It is the desire to say that one is better than something else, to create an outgroup and an ingroup and to label the outgroup inferior. This is the same motivation used to dehumanize various groups in order to justify slavery, genocide, etc.
You can insult people who hold such views all day, but I could just as easily say that anyone who doesn't see that, while typing on a computer and listening to music, has his eyes closed.
You've mistaken carefully considered disagreement for ignorance. I'm well aware of how other people think on this subject. I simply disagree, and I am both direct and unapologetic in my disagreement.
I don't do that, however, because I try not to be quite so arrogant.
"Never mud-wrestle a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig enjoys it."
When I'm debating people who don't understand or accept science, don't accept reason as a final arbiter of knowledge (faith-based knowledge, etc.), who basically don't want to discuss... I will appear quite arrogant. It is not worth my time to get down to their level to engage them on their terms. I don't accept their assumptions and premises as having any significance to what I consider the "real world". As a result, when discussing things with believers or continental philosophy types, I come across as a seriously arrogant asshole.
Every winter and every summer, the rate of snow deposition increases and decreases. This forms layers that are plainly visible in shallow ice cores, and which are less visible but still detectable in older ice cores. These layers can be counted, one per year, for as far back as the ice core is intact. Of course, eventually, you lose the ability to distinguish layers at all, then you use uranium dating or some other radioactive decay process to provide a date to within a few hundred or thousand years.
I've yet to see a convincing explanation of how ice core samples somehow give accurate local and/or global temperatures going back "tens of millions of years". Somehow I doubt that there is a calendar buried alongside a thermometer every few meters of ice.
Well, there's no telling what will convince you, personally (some won't be convinced unless you can show biblical chapter and verse). But as for something that might convince the typical curious reader, here's the quote from the wikipedia entry on ice cores:
Because water molecules containing heavier isotopes exhibit a lower vapor pressure, when the temperature falls, the heavier water molecules will condense faster than the normal water molecules. The relative concentrations of the heavier isotopes in the condensate indicate the temperature of condensation at the time, allowing for ice cores to be used in global temperature reconstruction.
So, yes, actually. There is a thermometer of sorts, right beside a calendar of sorts, sitting right there in the Greenland and antarctic ice. If you read farther in that article, you'll see that there are all sorts of proxies for climate data embedded in ice cores.
Isn't science amazing? I think the internet is pretty cool, too! The fact that all that science information is right there, on the other side of the click of a few keys. The only thing that's missing for most people is the interest.
I do need to issue a partial retraction. It seems as though ice cores only have effective climate data going back about 760,000 years. Not tens of millions of years. My apologies for the error as I took someone else's word for it when I should have researched the claim.
there is no logical reason that evolution implies that humans are not "special," in some way. (Of course, we'd have to define what "special" means in this instance).
There's an easy discriminator for "special". Find an intrinsic attribute common to all human beings, which is not found at all in any of "the animals". This attribute can't be something that humans have more of (like humans are smarter, or have more complex languages, etc.) it must be a completely different kind of thing in order to actually separate us from animals.
Not for lack of searching, science has made it clear that this "special" attribute doesn't exist. Humans are not distinct from other animals.
Now, Humans are a particularly adaptable animal. Clearly the most adaptable mammal. Better at symbolic logic than any other. But we are cousins to the ape and orangutan. They and we had a set of common ancestors only a few million years ago.
Making dubious philosophical claims, such as "Science shows that man isn't special,"
Far from dubious, the opposite claim is truly extraordinary and no evidence in support of the claim that "Man is special" has yet passed muster.
Not only are those statements categorically false
What? You've got some reading to do. The assertion that man is an animal, like all the other animals, has been well-established for some time now. The only people who don't accept it are those who stick fingers in their ears and shout "na-na-na-na!" whenever the incontrovertible evidence is brought out (again).
Man is not special. Evolution is an observed fact. Natural selection (with refinements) is currently the best theory to explain the observed diversity of species.
If you want to substitute something else for natural selection, be my guest, but it will have to explain as much as natural selection does and a few more things besides. FYI, "explains" means: "makes falsifiable assertions". Making falsifiable assertions is something that religious explanations simply cannot do.
It seems as though the article defines "history" to be the last 30 years, since we've had satellites monitoring it.
We have pulled ice cores which show temperatures going back tens of millions of years. According to that data, the last time this event happened was about 100,000 years ago. The timespan over which we know the historical water and air temperatures (and can predict sea ice coverage) goes back a lot longer than 30 years, 400 years, or even a few thousand years.
It is truly unfortunate that the facts have an anti-oil, anti-big-business bias. Liberals like to say that the facts have an anti-conservative bias, but as an anti-Bush, non-religious conservative, I don't buy that assertion for a minute. Sure our CO2 emissions are currently unbalancing nature. But the assertion that we can't do anything about it without cratering the economy? I don't buy it. If anything, I think there's serious money to be made fixing the problem.
Actually, doctors (including psychologists, psychiatrists, and plain old M.D.'s) prescribe placebo's all the time. Lots of people want to take a pill to fix what's wrong with them, so doctor's will provide one.
Some doctor's have a problem with it as they think that's deception and therefore fraud. What they aren't accepting is that they've got the patient's consent and agreement that a little self-deception is exactly what's needed sometimes.
I said that chiropractors did real beneficial things. What you don't know is if massage, stretching, and physical therapy directed by a doctor would have worked better or worse than your chiropractor. Bodies have an amazing ability to heal themselves with only a very little encouragement.
Acupuncture WORKS! Try having your teeth REMOVED using it to stop the pain.
I have no doubt that irritating nerves and nerve bundles by sticking a needle through them actually causes an effect on the human body. Blocking pain seems like a perfectly logical consequence of that action. What I don't buy are the causal explanations provided by acupuncturists or the extraordinary claims that acupuncture can be a cure for "all that ails you".
You take 100 people, 50 you treat with acupuncture, 50 not, or 50 with a placebo if you think that makes a difference.
The critical element of the double blind test is that neither the subject nor the tester should know if a particular subject got the treatment. How, exactly, do you propose that the subject not know if they got acupuncture? How, exactly, do you propose that the tester not know if the subject received acupuncture?
I suppose that you can take people who don't know the actual location of the meridians and then give some of them incorrect acupuncture and see if there's any effect. I suspect that this would be a very interesting experiment, but would take quite a bit of funding (you have to find untrained staff and then train half of them to give acupuncture incorrectly).
Pretty simple, in fact a standard way in science for conducting tests.
Interesting that you think so. It's a similar degree of scientific incompetence that's been present in every "scientific" study that backs up homeopathy and other quackeries. Once those errors have been corrected, every single studies show no difference from placebo. Please don't continue to pretend that you understand the slightest thing about science. Your confusion would be amusing if it wasn't so damaging to actual science.
So, now please start to enlighten us: which scientific experiment about which special acupuncture point are you aware off that proved that this point has no effect?
That's a truly extraordinary statement. It's a perfect example of "shifting the burden of proof." Practitioners of acupuncture are the people making the claims, they are responsible for substantiating the claims. Actually, your statement makes me believe that not only are you incompetent, but you're some sort of fraud who benefits from selling the lies of alternative medicine to the gullible. Just my opinion based on what you've written, but you're doing a pretty good job of convincing me.
Here in reality, I don't have to shoot it down, all I have to say is keep your needles out of my body until you prove that you're (1) not causing any harm and (2) causing some positive effect.
Now take a traditional medical against heart weakness, made from foxglove... guess what? It gets diluted also by a factor of 100 to 1000, equivalent to D1 and D2 dilutions in homeopathy. No one claims they don't work.
The problem with homeopathic logic is that the homeopath would expect the treatment to get even stronger through further dilution. The rational person and the doctor both expect the treatment to get weaker with further dilution.
I'm not astonished by small quantities of some substance being effective. What's astonishing is the claim that an even smaller quantity of that substance would be even more effective when everything I know about chemistry and biology says that's wrong. Luckily, homeopathy is quite willing to take this principle to the logical extreme, and dilute substances to the point where there's not a single particle of the original substance in the solvent. Then this pure alcohol/water/oil/whatever is sold as being strong medicine. As a result, it's quite straightforward to show how ridiculous homeopathy is.
Do you see the important difference?
Some chemical isolated from foxglove and dispensed in 0.1mg quantities: medicine
Pure water/alcohol/oil/whatever that used to contain some chemical isolated from foxglove but now doesn't: quackery and/or fraud
What I find particularly interesting is that in Darwin's day, they weren't arguing about whether or not Evolution happened, they were arguing about what made it happen. Darwin and his religious debaters were only discussing whether or not it was "God's hand" or "Natural Selection" that had caused evolution.
Here we are almost 150 years later, and not only are we still discussing the theory of Natural Selection, but the argument has moved backwards to whether or not the observed fact of Evolution actually occurred!
Evolution is intuitive and obvious. The problem with Evolution is it means "humans aren't special" and that's a mental hurdle that Christians in this country just can't manage to get over. The hubris of modern Christians is that human beings are different from other animals, not just in amount of some attribute, but in category. Humans and animals must be in different categories from each other or else most of the Biblical statements on humans is flat out wrong.
I understand why the discussion is moving backwards, I just find it extraordinary.
It's always nice to hear a positive story from a chiropractic patient on a forum such as this.
Chiropractors provide many things. Human touch. Warmth. Massage. Stretching. Advice on posture.
Those are all very good things for the human body. They lead to relaxation, reduced stress, reduced physical tension.
Which are further very good things for the human body. All together and individually, these actions and effects are known to be good for you, promote wellness and improve health.
The rest is mostly innocent quackery. Except for "adjusting" infants. That's dangerous quackery.
Colloidal Silver? Probably not a good idea.
Dangerous quackery.
Magnetic Healing? Probably something to it.
Probably something that can be sold for a profit. Fraudulent but harmless quackery.
Acupuncture? Definitely does something, but I don't think we know exactly what.
It pokes holes in you and irritates tissues normally protected by your skin. Other than that, lots of nearly untestable placebo effect.
Homeopathy? I've never been to a practitioner, but I'm honestly not too confident in the concepts.
The word you're searching for is "bullshit". Homeopathic medicine has lots of well-diluted bullshit and will be more than happy to sell you not-really tainted water at a price that makes bottled water vendors blush.
Homeopathy though? I continue to doubt.
That's a great start. Keep it up. Skepticism can be tiring, but is incredibly rewarding.
You're thinking of insurance in terms of value to the player, not the economic event. Sure, the player has to use the isk (along with other isk) to secure a new ship, find new equipment, etc. But that isk never existed before. The isk spent on the destroyed ship is still in circulation.
Now, clearly the insurance doesn't completely compensate the player for their loss of resources. That's what most players have to work against to keep playing.
As an economic event, insurance converts existing resources into new isk. So ship destruction is an important resource sink and is also an important money source.
Looks like you don't quite understand what "real estate" actually is. You can never own land in the same way that you own a sandwich or a gun. Sovereign nations possess land, and make the rights to use that land (for construction, storage, residence, etc.) available to people*. This arrangement is sometimes called ownership, but in reality, that word is being improperly (and sometimes dangerously) used.
These real estate rights that you have exclude others from simultaneously exercising the same rights, are mostly transferable, and not only cost money to acquire, but cost money to keep. In the form of property taxes. Fail to pay those taxes and the rights will be revoked. You'll be kicked off "your land" by the actual owner, the government.
This is also how forced easements and most eminent domain seizures happen. In most states, if the only way from the road to my property is through your property, I can go to the government and get permission to make an access road right through your property. Just because you own development rights to that land doesn't mean that you own exclusive rights to that land. No matter what terms are in common use, people don't own real estate, and never will. Land is a fundamentally different kind of property from other things.
When people forget this, or choose not to admit it, you end up with another bunch of kooky separatists in Montana locked up in four trailer homes pretending that they can keep the federales off "their land". It just ain't so.
Regards, Ross
* person and people are funny terms, too. Their legal meaning is substantially different from what you and I mean when we say "people" or "a person".
You have several ways of earning, only one of which (killing NPC's) generates new money.
Actually, collecting on insurance also generates new money (at least, that's my understanding of the current insurance system, which seems deliberately designed to be a significant money source in the game). PvP ship destruction is a resource sink but a money source for most players.
Not to dispute any your other arguments, but I did want to make sure that one more money source got mentioned.
It's more than that- to get good, you need experience.
There's different kinds of good.
I've worked with kids fresh out of school who can understand good design and have the enthusiasm to get into the system and the domain really quickly. Tell them something once, and later you see other people going to them for help for that exact same topic.
Then I've also had the misfortune to work with people with "15 years of experience" who have clearly been making the same mistakes each year for 15 years.
When you're looking at fresh-out-of-school-hires, there's only one real way to know if someone is one of those sharp kids that you really want on your team: someone told you about him/her.
My advice to the poster: learn how to network. Work on class projects with different people and keep working with the smart people. Get into a co-op or intern at interesting companies (ask other people who have already interned and don't stop asking until you find someone who's (1) sharp and (2) gung-ho about their job). Go to the local language user group meetings and see if those people are any good. Ask to help out on other people's senior projects that seem interesting to you.
The more people who know that you're a badass problem solver, the more likely you are to find work you enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
My abilities and my compensation do not seem to be reduced because I didn't complete another year of school. Competent developers with no degree, B.S. degree or B.S. & M.S. get about the same amount of money where I work, depending on their experience and leadership abilities. PhD's are not considered for what I do because they have decided to label themselves researchers, and we don't do significant research where I work.
So, having lost nothing by not having the M.S., but having gained a year of full-time employment when money was tight, I'm fairly confident that I made the right decision. A foreign student, wishing to become a permanent resident of the US could see the two year jump on the Green card and the opportunity to work locally with potential employers to be a significant boost to their career. They might make a different decision based on their very different circumstances, and they would also be right.
Just because she's sick or depressed or manic or suffering from any of a number of other conditions does not mean that she is no longer intelligent, is unable to accurately recall observations, and no is longer the best judge of many changes to her body. If she's delusional or suffering from dementia or one of a short list of similar mental problems, then and only then is it appropriate to suspect the accuracy of her observations.
Even if her conclusions are wrong, her pharmacological history and observations are asserted facts, and for the doctor to not even bother to read that data indicates that (s)he's a piss-poor doctor.
If your process claims to be agile, and a single person is at the office after 8pm, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
One of the twelve key practices of XP is "No Overtime".
The very first value statement of the Agile Manifesto is to value "Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools". (the team members are valuable, so don't abuse them)
Not to say that there aren't plenty of shops like yours, who think that "no written requirements and a release every month" means they're agile. But that's not agile, just abusive.
I'm aiming for someplace where English is at least routinely spoken. New Zealand, Ireland, Netherlands, India...
So many things become simpler when you understand that money and currency are different and that the relationship between money and currency is rather fluid.
Currency -- Money -- Wealth
Three completely separate, interrelated, and incredibly important measures in an economy. If you think any two of these things are the same, you need to learn more.
Banks aren't allowed to loan out more than they accept as deposits, so they always have assets on the books that are worth more than their debts. If all of the depositors to a bank head over and demand their deposits, the bank would have to borrow cash from other banks to meet those demands. But it could do it. The other banks would accept the loans as assets against which they're willing to temporarily provide cash. Everyone from that bank has their money back, the loans are still being collected against, etc. Now, the bank is probably in trouble, but it's depositors are just fine.
Inflation and deflation are measures of changes between the amount of money in an economy and the quantity of wealth, sometimes called value or utility, available for exchange. This change happens no matter what the kind of currency. Even precious metal money supplies can't be kept exactly aligned with the quantity of wealth and you usually have slow deflation as the supply of wealth grows slightly faster than the supply of currency. Economists have (very publically) determined that a steady state of low inflation results in the highest levels of both investment and economic growth, so our money supply is controlled such that it grows slightly faster than the underlying value/wealth in the economy. The result? Much faster economic growth.
Fundamentally, in an economy, there are three huge concepts: currency, money, and wealth. They're all different and whenever you see people getting their panties in a twist about banking, you can be certain someone thinks you can't (or shouldn't) separate the concepts of money and currency, with disastrous consequences for the resulting conclusions.
Hm. The specific rights needed are critically important here, and they're different for the photographer and Virgin because the uses are different.
My prediction: Virgin will settle (and they'll settle for plenty because they would otherwise lose), the photographer will not be in trouble at all.
Regards,
Ross
That's NERVA, not Orion. I'm kinda partial to NERVA myself. You can get particle velocities (and therefore impulse) way up without all of the drama of bomb flinging.
And Orion isn't stupid, it's just impractical for peacetime deployment since it quickly becomes the only means of getting itself into orbit (at least until we begin taking apart asteroids and building things from in-space materials). The NIMBY freaks would be all up-in-arms about this taking off nearby. And for once, they may be right...
Regards,
Ross
The link you provide starts off with a good skewering of Richard Dawkins, but then goes way too far into Christian apologetics to follow through on any sort of constructive argument.
Dawkins is wrong because... the Bible is right? Wow.
He had me at "Dawkins is an ass." The rest? Not so much.
You say you're hot shit scientist and philosopher? I'll take your word for it. I'll let you know that you don't present arguments like a hot shit scientist. You do present arguments like a certain branch of philosophy student that I normally have very little time for.
Before you get too excited about my category errors, please resolve your own. An example of your confusion: "a bit different from Apes" is not the same kind of assertion as "Man is not an animal but is intrinsically different in kind." By pretending that those two statements are similar, you're just making simplistic and naive apologetic assertions.
You know, the more I think about it, the less I buy your claims about your background. Not even a continental philosophy student would make the kinds of mistakes you're making (while simultaneously slinging mighty big assertions about my errors). You still haven't understood or responded to the original statement. Just doesn't make any sense. If someone's actually paying you for more than lab work, they're getting ripped off.
If my alarm comes across as non-scientific, that's because it is not a scientific argument. While based on scientific underpinnings, the issue is actually a political struggle against a very well-funded opponent.
Yeah, I'm abrupt. Yeah, I'm certain of myself (on this subject). No, we're not talking about my area of research. No, I haven't thought that I was discussing an interesting topic with peers.
No worries on any of it. Seems as though you don't share my alarm. Maybe you have better things to do with your time. Maybe the thought of living in a theocracy doesn't worry you. It worries me. So I'm doing my best, here and elsewhere, to argue against the growing power of the religious right.
I felt that I had already sufficiently clarified "special" as a difference of kind, and not simply of quantity. This definition of special is specifically chosen by modern Christian leaders who assert "Man is not an animal but is intrinsically different in kind." I made no assumptions in defining "special" the way I did (at least no non-metaphysical assumptions), so my response was to reiterate my definition more exhaustively.Great. Please provide your better definition.It seems simple enough to describe the feature. Religious leaders have been trying to do so for millenia. The best they've got so far is "the soul", an ineffable construct which modern cognitive science is quickly deconstructing.Christian leaders in the US absolutely do deny this. My original post was an observation about that denial, which is at the center of their denial of evolution.
(As an aside, I dislike the quotation convention which states that closing punctuation goes inside quotation marks, even when calling out a single word and not being used to surround a quotation. I prefer the British "convention".)I understand why people want to believe that, and I label it appropriately: it is pride, or more precisely, hubris. The motivation is not difficult to grasp as it seems hard-wired into our biology. It is the desire to say that one is better than something else, to create an outgroup and an ingroup and to label the outgroup inferior. This is the same motivation used to dehumanize various groups in order to justify slavery, genocide, etc.You've mistaken carefully considered disagreement for ignorance. I'm well aware of how other people think on this subject. I simply disagree, and I am both direct and unapologetic in my disagreement."Never mud-wrestle a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig enjoys it."
When I'm debating people who don't understand or accept science, don't accept reason as a final arbiter of knowledge (faith-based knowledge, etc.), who basically don't want to discuss... I will appear quite arrogant. It is not worth my time to get down to their level to engage them on their terms. I don't accept their assumptions and premises as having any significance to what I consider the "real world". As a result, when discussing things with believers or continental philosophy types, I come across as a seriously arrogant asshole.
So it goes.
Isn't science amazing? I think the internet is pretty cool, too! The fact that all that science information is right there, on the other side of the click of a few keys. The only thing that's missing for most people is the interest.
I do need to issue a partial retraction. It seems as though ice cores only have effective climate data going back about 760,000 years. Not tens of millions of years. My apologies for the error as I took someone else's word for it when I should have researched the claim.
Regards,
Ross
Not for lack of searching, science has made it clear that this "special" attribute doesn't exist. Humans are not distinct from other animals.
Now, Humans are a particularly adaptable animal. Clearly the most adaptable mammal. Better at symbolic logic than any other. But we are cousins to the ape and orangutan. They and we had a set of common ancestors only a few million years ago.Far from dubious, the opposite claim is truly extraordinary and no evidence in support of the claim that "Man is special" has yet passed muster.What? You've got some reading to do. The assertion that man is an animal, like all the other animals, has been well-established for some time now. The only people who don't accept it are those who stick fingers in their ears and shout "na-na-na-na!" whenever the incontrovertible evidence is brought out (again).
Man is not special. Evolution is an observed fact. Natural selection (with refinements) is currently the best theory to explain the observed diversity of species.
If you want to substitute something else for natural selection, be my guest, but it will have to explain as much as natural selection does and a few more things besides. FYI, "explains" means: "makes falsifiable assertions". Making falsifiable assertions is something that religious explanations simply cannot do.
It is truly unfortunate that the facts have an anti-oil, anti-big-business bias. Liberals like to say that the facts have an anti-conservative bias, but as an anti-Bush, non-religious conservative, I don't buy that assertion for a minute. Sure our CO2 emissions are currently unbalancing nature. But the assertion that we can't do anything about it without cratering the economy? I don't buy it. If anything, I think there's serious money to be made fixing the problem.
Actually, doctors (including psychologists, psychiatrists, and plain old M.D.'s) prescribe placebo's all the time. Lots of people want to take a pill to fix what's wrong with them, so doctor's will provide one.
Some doctor's have a problem with it as they think that's deception and therefore fraud. What they aren't accepting is that they've got the patient's consent and agreement that a little self-deception is exactly what's needed sometimes.
Regards,
Ross
Regards,
Ross
I suppose that you can take people who don't know the actual location of the meridians and then give some of them incorrect acupuncture and see if there's any effect. I suspect that this would be a very interesting experiment, but would take quite a bit of funding (you have to find untrained staff and then train half of them to give acupuncture incorrectly).Interesting that you think so. It's a similar degree of scientific incompetence that's been present in every "scientific" study that backs up homeopathy and other quackeries. Once those errors have been corrected, every single studies show no difference from placebo. Please don't continue to pretend that you understand the slightest thing about science. Your confusion would be amusing if it wasn't so damaging to actual science.That's a truly extraordinary statement. It's a perfect example of "shifting the burden of proof." Practitioners of acupuncture are the people making the claims, they are responsible for substantiating the claims. Actually, your statement makes me believe that not only are you incompetent, but you're some sort of fraud who benefits from selling the lies of alternative medicine to the gullible. Just my opinion based on what you've written, but you're doing a pretty good job of convincing me.
Here in reality, I don't have to shoot it down, all I have to say is keep your needles out of my body until you prove that you're (1) not causing any harm and (2) causing some positive effect.The problem with homeopathic logic is that the homeopath would expect the treatment to get even stronger through further dilution. The rational person and the doctor both expect the treatment to get weaker with further dilution.
I'm not astonished by small quantities of some substance being effective. What's astonishing is the claim that an even smaller quantity of that substance would be even more effective when everything I know about chemistry and biology says that's wrong. Luckily, homeopathy is quite willing to take this principle to the logical extreme, and dilute substances to the point where there's not a single particle of the original substance in the solvent. Then this pure alcohol/water/oil/whatever is sold as being strong medicine. As a result, it's quite straightforward to show how ridiculous homeopathy is.
Do you see the important difference?
Thanks for playing,
Ross
What I find particularly interesting is that in Darwin's day, they weren't arguing about whether or not Evolution happened, they were arguing about what made it happen. Darwin and his religious debaters were only discussing whether or not it was "God's hand" or "Natural Selection" that had caused evolution.
Here we are almost 150 years later, and not only are we still discussing the theory of Natural Selection, but the argument has moved backwards to whether or not the observed fact of Evolution actually occurred!
Evolution is intuitive and obvious. The problem with Evolution is it means "humans aren't special" and that's a mental hurdle that Christians in this country just can't manage to get over. The hubris of modern Christians is that human beings are different from other animals, not just in amount of some attribute, but in category. Humans and animals must be in different categories from each other or else most of the Biblical statements on humans is flat out wrong.
I understand why the discussion is moving backwards, I just find it extraordinary.
Regards,
Ross
Those are all very good things for the human body. They lead to relaxation, reduced stress, reduced physical tension.
Which are further very good things for the human body. All together and individually, these actions and effects are known to be good for you, promote wellness and improve health.
The rest is mostly innocent quackery. Except for "adjusting" infants. That's dangerous quackery.Dangerous quackery.Probably something that can be sold for a profit. Fraudulent but harmless quackery.It pokes holes in you and irritates tissues normally protected by your skin. Other than that, lots of nearly untestable placebo effect.The word you're searching for is "bullshit". Homeopathic medicine has lots of well-diluted bullshit and will be more than happy to sell you not-really tainted water at a price that makes bottled water vendors blush.That's a great start. Keep it up. Skepticism can be tiring, but is incredibly rewarding.
Regards,
Ross
You're thinking of insurance in terms of value to the player, not the economic event. Sure, the player has to use the isk (along with other isk) to secure a new ship, find new equipment, etc. But that isk never existed before. The isk spent on the destroyed ship is still in circulation.
Now, clearly the insurance doesn't completely compensate the player for their loss of resources. That's what most players have to work against to keep playing.
As an economic event, insurance converts existing resources into new isk. So ship destruction is an important resource sink and is also an important money source.
Looks like you don't quite understand what "real estate" actually is. You can never own land in the same way that you own a sandwich or a gun. Sovereign nations possess land, and make the rights to use that land (for construction, storage, residence, etc.) available to people*. This arrangement is sometimes called ownership, but in reality, that word is being improperly (and sometimes dangerously) used.
These real estate rights that you have exclude others from simultaneously exercising the same rights, are mostly transferable, and not only cost money to acquire, but cost money to keep. In the form of property taxes. Fail to pay those taxes and the rights will be revoked. You'll be kicked off "your land" by the actual owner, the government.
This is also how forced easements and most eminent domain seizures happen. In most states, if the only way from the road to my property is through your property, I can go to the government and get permission to make an access road right through your property. Just because you own development rights to that land doesn't mean that you own exclusive rights to that land. No matter what terms are in common use, people don't own real estate, and never will. Land is a fundamentally different kind of property from other things.
When people forget this, or choose not to admit it, you end up with another bunch of kooky separatists in Montana locked up in four trailer homes pretending that they can keep the federales off "their land". It just ain't so.
Regards,
Ross
* person and people are funny terms, too. Their legal meaning is substantially different from what you and I mean when we say "people" or "a person".
Not to dispute any your other arguments, but I did want to make sure that one more money source got mentioned.
Regards,
ross
I've worked with kids fresh out of school who can understand good design and have the enthusiasm to get into the system and the domain really quickly. Tell them something once, and later you see other people going to them for help for that exact same topic.
Then I've also had the misfortune to work with people with "15 years of experience" who have clearly been making the same mistakes each year for 15 years.
When you're looking at fresh-out-of-school-hires, there's only one real way to know if someone is one of those sharp kids that you really want on your team: someone told you about him/her.
My advice to the poster: learn how to network. Work on class projects with different people and keep working with the smart people. Get into a co-op or intern at interesting companies (ask other people who have already interned and don't stop asking until you find someone who's (1) sharp and (2) gung-ho about their job). Go to the local language user group meetings and see if those people are any good. Ask to help out on other people's senior projects that seem interesting to you.
The more people who know that you're a badass problem solver, the more likely you are to find work you enjoy.
Regards,
Ross